Prize Recipients are honored for advancing breakthrough IBD treatments, pioneering new models of patient care, and unlocking new frontiers of discovery.
BOCA RATON, Florida, September 15, 2026 – Today, the Bruce and Cynthia Sherman Charitable Foundation announced the recipients of the 2026 Sherman Prizes, recognizing three physician-scientists who are dedicated to improving outcomes for patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis, collectively known as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Their exceptional contributions span advances in treatment, innovative models of care, and breakthrough approaches to understanding and managing these complex diseases.
2026 Sherman Prize Honorees
2026 Sherman Emerging Leader Prize Honoree
“We are honored to recognize Drs. Regueiro, Sands, and Sinha, whose remarkable work represents the extraordinary breadth of what is possible in IBD, from transforming patient care and advancing treatment to making discoveries that open new possibilities for the future,” said Bruce and Cynthia Sherman, the founders of the Sherman Prize. “Their achievements embody the spirit of the Sherman Prize—to recognize exceptional contributions while inspiring continued innovation and progress for generations to come.”
The Prize recipients will be recognized at the Advances in IBD (AIBD) conference in Orlando, Florida, on December 8, 2026, where a tribute film for each honoree will premiere. The films will be available to watch at ShermanPrize.org following the conference.
Dr. Corey A. Siegel, 2026 Selection Committee Chair and 2023 Sherman Prize recipient, said: “Drs. Regueiro and Sands have made, and continue to make, field-shaping contributions to IBD care through clinical leadership, scientific innovation, and an unwavering commitment to patients. Dr. Sinha exemplifies the talent and ambition of a remarkable new generation of investigators, giving us tremendous confidence in the future of IBD research and care. It is a privilege to recognize these exceptional physician-scientists.”
About the 2026 Prize Recipients
Dr. Miguel Regueiro is awarded a $100,000 Sherman Prize for transforming post-operative Crohn’s disease management and developing an innovative model for whole-person IBD care.
Considered the global expert in post-operative Crohn’s disease management, Dr. Regueiro’s research in this area has been groundbreaking, fundamentally changing how providers care for patients with CD.
Early in his career, he conducted a landmark study that demonstrated that infliximab was highly effective at preventing postoperative recurrence. Among the 24 patients in Dr. Regueiro’s original study, only one patient who received infliximab experienced endoscopic recurrence compared with more than 80 percent of those receiving placebo. These findings eventually led to PREVENT (Prospective, Randomized, Evaluation of Values and Efficacy), the pivotal multicenter international trial that Dr. Regueiro went on to lead. The trial verified the early findings and resulted in multiple high-impact publications that helped shape international guidelines and establish postoperative biologic therapy as a standard approach for high-risk patients.
More recently, Dr. Regueiro and his team have started a novel study randomly assigning patients with CD of the ileum who have failed one advanced therapy to one of two paths: a second advanced therapy or surgery to remove the affected ileal segment. The study could help determine whether some patients have a better option with surgery than spending years cycling through medications.
One of his most significant contributions to the field came from recognizing that, in caring for patients, treating the inflammatory disease is only part of the equation.
Patients came to his clinic facing not only bowel symptoms related to IBD, but anxiety, medication costs, nutritional challenges, and relationship strains. Recognizing the need for holistic care, he partnered with his Pittsburgh colleague, behavioral health specialist Dr. Eva Szigethy (2016 Sherman Prize Recipient) to build the first IBD Medical Home, bringing together one team focused on the whole person rather than just the diagnosis. The first IBD paper, published in 2017, served as a blueprint that other medical centers have since adopted, and the model has begun to move beyond IBD into other chronic diseases.
Since then, Dr. Regueiro has adapted the Medical Home framework, using AI and digital tools as patient needs – and technology – have changed. Now, he is expanding this approach into the ‘Medical Neighborhood’. This initiative has profoundly improved the social and emotional well-being of IBD patients and their families.
That same collaborative approach reaches beyond patient care. His team has started an international data registry and biobank to investigate differences across populations, environmental influences, and IBD “-omics.” While this work will initially include Cleveland Clinic centers worldwide, they plan to incorporate other global centers to create an international healthcare that extends beyond a single hospital or healthcare system.
In partnering with multiple academic medical centers, Dr. Regueiro founded the first virtual educational meeting, IBD Live, a weekly multi-institutional, multidisciplinary interactive webcast connecting approximately 400 healthcare providers from around the world to work through complex cases.
As GI Fellowship Director at UPMC, and later as GI Chair and Digestive Disease Institute Chief at Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Regueiro has inspired the next generation of IBD practitioners, personally mentoring many of the trainees who are now national leaders in IBD. Adding to this is his role as Co-Chair of the Advances in IBD (AIBD) conference, where he has helped grow this meeting to the largest IBD educational program in the United States and expanding the focus beyond physicians to advanced practice providers, nurses, and pharmacists.
Dr. Bruce E. Sands is awarded a $100,000 Sherman Prize for his groundbreaking work in clinical trial design, propelling IBD research forward, and revolutionizing treatments for IBD.
When Dr. Sands was six years old, his parents gave him a working stethoscope and microscope, igniting a lifelong passion for science. That early fascination ultimately led him to medicine and gastroenterology, where he became captivated by the complex interplay of the muscular, neurologic and immune systems.
Today, Dr. Sands is a world-renowned expert in IBD clinical trial design, whose work has helped enable the development of nearly every modern medicine for IBD.
As a Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Sands was at the forefront of the biologic revolution as an investigator on the first randomized controlled trial of infliximab. The successful trial led to the first approved biologic for IBD and helped establish a new standard of patient care. The experience launched his enduring commitment to clinical research and to translating scientific advances into meaningful benefits for patients.
Since then, Dr. Sands has relentlessly pushed the boundaries of IBD research. Most notably, he has led, co-led or served as a key investigator on trials establishing the efficacy and safety of multiple new classes of IBD treatments, helping reshape the therapeutic landscape and expand options for patients.
A pioneer in advancing how physicians evaluate treatments, Dr. Sands also led VARSITY, the first head-to-head trial in IBD, which established that vedolizumab was more effective than adalimumab in people with moderate to severe ulcerative colitis. More recent head-to-head studies, including GALAXI-2 and GALAXI-3, have provided critical evidence to guide treatment choices for patients with Crohn’s disease.
His vision for the future of IBD care extends to precision medicine and combination therapy. Through ARTEMIS-UC, Dr. Sands explored whether biomarkers could identify patients most likely to respond to treatment—a critical step toward delivering the right medicine to the right patient. He has been instrumental in advancing the study of combination therapy in IBD, serving as senior investigator of the VEGA trial and contributing to the DUET studies, which demonstrated the potential of combining two mechanisms of action to achieve remission in patients who have failed prior advanced therapies.
Underlying all of Dr. Sands’ research is a determination to find better options for patients who have not benefited fully, or at all, from existing treatments.
His impact extends beyond the treatments he helps develop to the people who will carry the field forward. As Chief of the Dr. Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Health System, Dr. Sands has mentored dozens of young gastroenterologists, many of whom have gone on to provide expert IBD care and pursue innovative research of their own. He has also served as Chairman of the International Organization for the Study of IBD and as Associate Editor of Gastroenterology and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, helping advance research and best practices in IBD care.
Looking ahead, Dr. Sands remains focused on advancing precision medicine, making clinical trials more efficient, and improving disease monitoring to accelerate the development of more effective treatments. His goal is not simply to build on the remarkable progress of the past decade, but to help shape what comes next—while mentoring the next generation of IBD clinician-scientists who will carry forward his hopes for the future of the field.
Dr. Sidhartha R. Sinha is awarded the $25,000 Sherman Emerging Leader Prize for challenging conventional thinking and pioneering new solutions to address patients’ unmet needs.
Dr. Sinha’s career is defined by a rare curiosity about problems others may overlook and a determination to pursue them wherever they lead. Guided by patients’ unmet needs, he looks beyond conventional approaches, connecting ideas, expertise and disciplines from unexpected places to find better answers.
As a first-year GI fellow, Dr. Sinha saw an opportunity to solve a longstanding challenge for a patient in his 90s with ulcerative colitis whose existing treatments were resulting in severe bone loss and other side effects. He assembled a team, including Stanford material scientists, to develop a groundbreaking thermosensitive delivery system that targets treatment directly to affected tissue—an innovation published in Gastroenterology that has advanced to human trials.
It is this rare ability to envision what does not yet exist, find a way to build it, and bring together the expertise to make it possible that sets Dr. Sinha apart.
Noticing patients with CD having few evidence-based answers to the question of what to eat, he looked beyond existing options and led the largest randomized controlled trial of a non-exclusionary dietary treatment in adults with CD. Five days on the fasting-mimicking diet each month for three consecutive months produced a clinical response in 69 percent of patients and remission in 65 percent, both significantly higher than in the control group. This study was published in Nature Medicine.
He likewise established the use of a swallowable capsule technology to assess the microbiome and metabolome within the small intestine in patients with IBD, overcoming a major limitation of traditional stool-based research; this work earned a 2024 Rainin Foundation Innovator Award.
Dr. Sinha has brought the same imagination to some of IBD’s most difficult challenges. His research is uncovering the potential of widely used statins to prevent or slow fibrosis and disease progression, taking those findings from large-scale retrospective studies to two prospective clinical trials designed to determine both their effectiveness and which patients are most likely to benefit.
He is also rethinking how disease can be monitored, demonstrating that molecules in exhaled breath condensate can distinguish active from inactive ulcerative colitis and potentially outperform conventional blood and stool biomarkers in discovery and validation cohorts. The work could ultimately give patients a simpler, less invasive way to track disease activity and response to treatment.
His contributions go well beyond his discoveries. Having mentored more than 20 trainees, Dr. Sinha is also helping build a culture of innovation and mentorship through the AGA Center for GI Innovation and Technology and Stanford GI Division, paying forward the generosity of the mentors who shaped his own career.
At the center of it all is an unwavering commitment to patients. Whether through precision nutrition, microbiome science, novel therapies, or new ways to monitor disease, Dr. Sinha’s work is ultimately guided by one defining question: What do our patients need most?
About the Sherman Prize
The Sherman Prize was established in 2016 by the Bruce and Cynthia Sherman Charitable Foundation to provide national recognition and financial prizes to exceptionally talented, dedicated individuals working tirelessly to improve outcomes for people with CD and ulcerative colitis, and advance research that could lead to prevention, remission, and cures.
The $100,000 Sherman Prize is awarded to IBD clinicians, surgeons, researchers, and/or academics, recognizing exceptional and pioneering contributions that transform the care of people with IBD. A $25,000 Sherman Emerging Leader Prize is awarded to IBD clinicians, surgeons, researchers, academics, or physician assistants who, while early in their careers, have contributed to an advancement and show great promise for significant future contributions.
Selection decisions are made by the Board of Directors, following an extensive review and evaluation by the Prize Selection Committee, which is comprised of five of the nation’s preeminent IBD specialists. Visit ShermanPrize.org to view the Honor Roll of Sherman Prize recipients, watch their inspiring tribute films, and sign up to receive notification of the 2027 nomination cycle.
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